This page will be the parent for various pages about Flex, including coding tips, packaging, distribution, etc.
I copied this from a post I made in reply to this post at Ben Clinkenbeard's blog: Is The Open Screen Project a Good Thing
That brings up a question I’ve thought about in the past, and is related to what Adobe must be trying to do with Flash/Flex. How does Sun stay in business and make money off of Java? They have the number two or three IDE (NetBeans), I haven’t seen a SUN workstation in probably a decade or more (I know many companies use them and the AIX platform used at my company is no more ubiquitous), much (most?) of the innovation in the Java space comes from elsewhere (Hibernate, Spring, JBoss, etc.), yet they seem to be doing quite well. I’m not a business expert by any means and SUN certainly isn’t going to say “We’re two quarters from bankruptcy.”, but I’ve never heard any rumors of their impending death either. So SUN seems to be making it work for them. Maybe Adobe wants to follow in their footsteps, whatever they are.
I also think, that if Adobe keeps the basic control over the Flash/Flex, SWF platform that is a good thing. I believe all of the successful open source projects have a strong central body guiding them. Open source is great for innovation and expanding the capabilities of your system because you invite the collective development talent of the world (at least that part of the world that buys into your platform) to add their ideas to it, but you have to have a central body that keeps the platform from splintering and becoming too fragmented.
I personally think Flex/AIR is the best thing to come along for GUI development since Visual Basic ruled the Windows world. I tried doing a GUI in Java for a project I’ve been working on, in my spare time, and ultimately abandoned it after I found Bruce Eckel’s post about the failures of Java in the GUI realm. Flex/AIR has most of the advantages of Visual Basic (it really needs a better IDE though, I’m developing my application without FlexBuilder due to both cost and my perception of little value added by it). Flex/AIR also has they great ability to communicate with WebServices and use the AMF protocol, that blows away HTTP in terms of speed. I love that data binding is built into the language (and you can bind manually if need be as well). I think Flex/AIR with a Java backend, for larger projects is the killer combination for today’s GUI development.
No I don’t work for Adobe, I just think they have a great platform and have learned from Java’s mistakes in the GUI realm. Also they aren’t trying to replace Java totally, they leave the backed, which Java excels at to Java and take the frontend, which their whole Flex/Flash/AIR platform is built for to themselves
